Saturday, January 3, 2009

A lot of people have arrived at Atheist Wisdom after googling for "Religulous quotes", so here are a few more of my favourites. First, Bill Maher talking to Father Reginald Foster, a senior Vatican priest:

BM: The date of Jesus’ birth really wasn’t established until 349 AD.

RF: Oh yeah, that’s because… he might have been born on July 3rd. These are all just nice stories, you know.

BM: And that doesn’t bother you either?

RF: Well it bothers me when everyone says “Oh, we have to have midnight mass because Jesus was born at midnight on the 25th”. This is all nonsense.

17 comments:

“The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about lraq, but he didn't learn a lot about it.(...)

(...)Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it's wonderful when someone says, ''l'm willing, Lord. l'll do whatever You want me to do.'' Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions , - limitations and agendas.(...)

(...)And anyone who tells you they know- they just know what happens when you die, l promise you, you don't . How can l be so sure? Because l don't know, and you do not possess mental powers that l do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion but doubt. Doubt is humble and that's what man needs to be considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.(...)

(...)This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.(...)

(...)If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a Mafia wife, with the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travellers. lf the world does come to an end here or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let's remember what the real problem was: That we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That's it. Grow up or die.”

Taking about religulous, bill maher and I are no atheists.. I think atheists are arrogant just as religious people, because they claim to know something they dont. I cant deny that there is no god.. I THINK there is no god, but I cant be sure. Anyway the odds for believing there is no god are infinite times higher than the ones to believe ther is one. Doubt is the answer, we dont know until we have evidence

It would be extremely rare to find a self-proclaimed atheist who claimed he KNEW there was no god or any sort of supernatural entity. You said it yourself, the reasons for believeing there is no god are many times stronger than the reasons to believe there is one. You believe there is no God - this makes you an Atheist - uncertainty is inherent in belief (granted a religious person would disagree), otherwise you would say I know there is no God. To present yourself to the world as agnostic I consider moral cowardice - it is merely a way to deflect religious people's attacks on oneself. I do not know there is no god, but I'm pretty confident I'm right - I'm atheist.

Obviously no one in the world is perfect or even close. The main reason to have faith in a religion is to have insurance. If Bill is right and everyone dies after thousands of years then Bill wont be there to say I told you so. So in the end, if he is right then it really doesn't matter at all. Now if he is wrong and a religion is correct, just for the simple fact of them having faith and being saved then I feel for bill because it would turn out horrible after death. That is the reason that I do believe in a God, the fact that if there is a possibility that there is then Im not screwed when I die.

One more thing that everyone has to understand, which is already difficult because we are nothing but humans and dont have much knowledge at all, is that if we can not understand how something as simple as the human brain and how it actually works and we can make one ourselfs how then will we be able to understand the knowledge of God? That is why faith is the only thing to hold on to, no matter who Bill talks to he will not find an answer, unless he talks to God himself.

"Perfect" varies among religions, faith varies within each denomination/schism. Prove your conviction isn't a cultural meme. If you grew up a Muslim, could you prove to us you would still have chosen your own faith? Faith as insurance is foolish, defying odds that you are correct. Replace "insurance" with "gambling," and why wouldn't God see you as disingenuous and deceitful, denying you access to Heaven because you lacked sincerity, or have faith based on fear? Not every religion believes in salvation; lacking reflection, yet embracing certainty, is delusional. Saying those who don't believe in God will not be saved is offensive to those who don't know: Of God, whether God exists, which religion is the one "true" religion, or which denomination or schism is the right one. Understanding in the broadest sense will always be a progressive state, unlike limited, unquestioning, regressive beliefs constrained by faith, whereas science and rationalism must be open to reproducibility and subject to change if the hypothesis is wrong. When humankind searches for answers, using our attempt to understand anything that can be conceived, theories are developed and in order to understand any concept, we must remain open to reversals where competing theories must be examined and debated. Understanding "the knowledge of God" though will remain incomplete and unquantifiable due to the limits of perception the human brain can create. There is the known, the unknown and the unknowable; at what point in the future could we say we fully understand the human brain? How will we ever know the point when our understanding is complete, and why would knowing this mean we could even begin to extrapolate this understanding of the human brain towards an understanding of "the knowledge of God"? The first step towards understanding God can never be by the limited view believers have of the cosmos or consciousness because faith will always be limited, constrained and unquestionable, defying the very nature of humankind's curiosity and compulsion to examine, question and test theories, which is everything science can offer, and not unlike the curiosity and questioning nature of children, before they were told how to think and what to believe. Theories remain theories due to transparency and flexibility in science, whereas faith is a static, unchanging belief that does not allow believers to question its oppressive, prejudicial and contradictory qualities, one issue that makes Free Will an illusion. Your claim to faith in this context means you did talk to God? By your own admission, you must have talked to God to have an answer, therefore faith (this must be the case, otherwise your faith is baseless, right?) so what convinced you it was God talking to you and not the Devil, or, why isn't it possible you did not have a self-delusional auditory hallucination? If the Devil is deceitful and clever, what is your means testing to prove to the world, or at least to yourself, that you weren't being lied to? If God is "perfect", why would God leave torture and rape out of the Ten Commandments? Does that mean they're okay? Why do most Christians today denounce slavery if it was acceptable to God, or in today's world, not kill children when they speak out against their parents, and why would anyone honor thy mother and father if they beat, starve, molest or otherwise traumatize infants and children? Why isn't faith a dangerous thing to the believer when there are blatant contradictions and mistreatment within the world's religions? Why is the concept of Free Will lost on people like you, who out of fear, choose to remain oblivious to all the contradictions, wars and social oppression and injustice that continues to this day in the name of God? Ultimately, there is no Free Will if we cannot choose to denounce God, or accept God only because we fear Hell.

That last comment was so well written(with the exception of a typo... I'm a teacher, sorry lol)I cannot nor will I attempt to follow it up. The only thing I will say is that I could not have said it any more thoroughly, clearly or articulately than that. I love the part about the 10 Commandments. Shouldn't they be "The 10 recommendations?" God has, and continues to be (at least in my view) a needless invention, proposed by those who would control individual thought and dished out as pablum for the masses. God is the crutch for those who prefer to believe in fairy stories than in actual study of the realities of the human condition. Until we think beyond the "God" complex, we will never really be free as a people. That will never happen in my or your lifetime. Alas..

It's called Agnostic Athiest when someone does not believe in God but doesn't claim to have evidence he doesn't exist, opposed to Gnostic Athiest (which most morons refer to as Athiest). There are also Agnostic Theist and Gnostic Theist. Athiest/Theist is the belief, Agnostic/Gnostic is the claim of facts to back the belief.